


Fate's Twisted Games

by shieldivarius



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Age Difference, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, F/F, F/M, Femslash Endgame
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-09-07
Updated: 2015-12-01
Packaged: 2018-04-19 15:10:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 13,797
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4750886
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shieldivarius/pseuds/shieldivarius
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>the one where you share extreme physical sensation until you find them; if one of you hurts the other one hurts</i>
</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>They said everyone had someone out there, but Melinda had stopped believing that one when she hit her 20s without a single Phantom Pain incident.</p><p>Then they started happening.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> How do you put your fanon OTP and your canon OTP in a fic when they share a character without wanting to tear your hair out because _something's gotta give_?

_the heart is hard to translate; it has a language of its own  
All This and Heaven Too - Florence + the Machine_

Pain.

_Pain._

Red hot, blinding, and arcing through her body as though flame scorched across her skin, charring every nerve ending. Keeping them open, raw, burning—

Until it faded. Ebbed away, leaving only tightness through muscles that tension had locked tight together. The stiffness that racked her body, the inability to move, was the only immediate thing consciousness brought. Awareness picked its way through her mind with more reluctance, as though trailing behind in its footsteps. The heavy scent of sweat assaulted her nose before she knew how her clothes clung to her, drenched in it. Dryness tickled the back of her throat, no sound emerging when she tried to moan.

A click, the switch of the lamp on the bedside table, and the backs of her eyelids lit up red.

“You with me? Melinda?”

Her eyelashes fluttered, keeping her vision edged and blurred as she blinked to focus. She wished she could bring her knees down from where they curled up, pressed to her chest, or at least that she could unclench her hands from their tense claws. 

Already the pain had faded like a distant memory, and a head-to-toe check ensured there were no remaining problem spots, nothing that would suggest anything had been inflicted on her.

Andrew sat in her eyeline, back and away from her so as not to crowd her out, but there and present and watching over her.

Melinda managed to push herself up on her arm, not moving much but able to shift her weight enough to lift half her torso from the bed.

“I’m here,” she said to the concern on his face.

“Nightmare?”

She shook her head, lips drawn thin. “Pain. I thought...” She took a long breath in through her nose, unable to say the words. The _pain_. How could she even begin to describe feeling like she would die, but not having any injuries at all?

“You mean phantom pain,” he said, hesitant until she nodded.

“He… they were on fire. It was…” 

Andrew stayed quiet, still sitting back on his heels, but opening his arms and radiating support. 

She crawled to him, all that she could do, and sunk down against his chest. “It… No one could have survived that. What I felt.” A shudder overtook her.

He held her tighter. “I’m sorry,” he whispered into her hair. 

His arms tightened around her, and she tried to find the words to tell him that this changed nothing.

They didn’t come.

 

“I found him,” she told Andrew the next day, laying the newspaper down between them on the coffee table. Local news, some pages in, but the small headline spelled out the story of an explosion the night before. A picture of the victim took up more space than the text of the story; he had been attractive, with brown hair, a freckled nose and brown eyes that had probably been nicer than the grainy newsprint could highlight. 

His name was Colin. Melinda wondered if she should feel more connection than vague curiosity about what he’d been like.

“2:30 this morning. Rolled his truck and he went out with it.”

Her gaze drifted from Colin’s picture to an ad on the opposite page for a Finder, someone who specialized in finding soulmates, who took your records of when you’d broken an arm, or felt bursts of phantom pain, and tried to match up people whose timelines synced. 

Finders—for that matter, most people—said that everyone had someone out there but some, like Melinda until this morning, or like Andrew, had never felt even a twinge to suggest there were anyone out there for them.

A myriad of explanations existed as to the why. Your partner played it safe. You’d held hands with them in line in preschool. You’d accidentally brushed their hand in a crowd at a festival, or while receiving change at the supermarket. You’d had that tiny bit of contact to trigger the connection, and _wasn’t it silly that evolution was so flawed that we don’t immediately know!_ Anything to explain away why some people failed to find their ‘perfect’ match.

“I’ll send flowers, I guess,” Melinda hedged. It seemed inadequate.

But Colin hadn’t been married, hadn’t been seeing anyone, and from all that she could tell from reading the article, had been waiting for his soulmate to stumble into him. The timelines matched, and they were from the same general area (60% of found partners were).

Some people missed their connections because they weren’t paying attention. Some, Melinda was sure, didn’t have soulmates at all.

And still others only learned of them when that partner had already passed.

Melinda sent flowers. She didn’t include a note.

 

S.H.I.E.L.D. protocol required field agents who hadn’t found their soulmates to register phantom pain occurrences. It kept there from being any surprises in the field, in case of an explosion of sensation like the one Melinda had had, a factor that needed to be weighed just in case.

Like any medical condition, someone prone to debilitating bursts of pain like Melinda had felt would be considered unsafe to be a field operative. 

Colin was dead. Melinda didn’t report the incident. Didn’t even take a day off, and instead went about her life as though nothing had happened. She felt worse about her lack of attraction to his photo in the paper than she did about her inability to mourn him.

Twinges of wondering what it might have been like overtook her at times, of course. Who had he been? What would their life have been like, had they met? Would he have understood her? Would he have understood her _better than Andrew?_ She found that hard to believe.

 

The sideways glances Andrew gave her in the time following became more and more infrequent as it grew clearer that the incident had, indeed, been a one-time occurrence. They'd tapered off entirely, in fact, by the time she left on a week-long mission in Sao Paolo, some six months later.

Three days after she'd returned, the looks did too.

A spattering of bruises along the left side of her body had come home with her, souvenirs from being caught in the ripple of a grenade blast that stole the ground from beneath her feet. As she picked at the crust on her pizza though, it was her right shoulder she rubbed, wishing that her fingers could dig in far enough to pound out the ache that had started up there.

"Want some help with that?" Andrew asked, and there was that look again. 

She filed it away for later and leaned into his outstretched hand. 

The dull pain continued to throb through the effect of her painkillers, the pressure of Andrew’s fingers pressing into the tight muscle doing nothing to assuage it. 

“Must’ve wrenched it when the place blew,” Melinda offered to the silence spreading between them. There were a dozen reasons why the pain could have waited this long to start up.

“Yeah,” Andrew said. He sounded far away, though, and she wondered if he’d chased the idea of this being phantom pain as far down the rabbit hole as she had. 

They said you were always— _always_ —able to tell. Maybe that was the case if you had a desk job, a safe life where you’d notice if suddenly your leg ached for no reason, or you felt like you’d broken your finger when all you’d done was turn the page in a file. And how coincidental, for her aching shoulder to be related to anything other than her own pre-existing injuries.

Still, she couldn't shake the niggling feeling that the two were unrelated. Even if Colin was dead.

Melinda pressed further into Andrew's hand. "How about a movie Friday night?"

 

A year passed. Then two. Melinda spent six months stationed in Venezuela and another month undercover in Taipei, and when she’d returned home, she and Andrew moved in together.

Through it all, mysterious aches sprung up sporadically, but with such little impact that Melinda was able to ignore them. She kept track and counted each and every instance, even if she could explain it away as being connected to something else—a hard workout, being shot, or that one time a junior agent had collided with her on the stairs and taken her down with him when he fell.

Three and a half years passed before she had another incident. 

Three and a half years, almost down to the day, and Melinda woke, trembling, in a cot with her leg aching and an IV hooked into her hand. 

Eyes closed and trying to get her bearings, Melinda sucked the smell of disinfectant deep into her lungs. She took deep breaths until the leftover pain seemed to be abating, all except for the throbbing in her leg at least, and finally forced her eyes open to take a quick survey of her surroundings.

Maria Hill sat in a chair in the corner of the room, wedged into a tight spot near the door, with a clipboard open on her lap.

“You don’t have phantom pain reports in your file,” she said without preamble. 

Melinda resisted shutting her eyes and rolling over to escape this conversation, wished that Andrew was present instead. But of course, she’d been on a job when it happened. The throbbing in her leg—had she been shot? She couldn’t remember, could barely even remember going down, the first ripples of phantom pain warning her something bad was going to happen before it overtook her. Whoever had gotten her out had done well on the evac, at least.

“We contacted Andrew,” Maria continued.

Melinda sat up, and a machine off to her side beeped in protest. “It’s happened before,” she admitted. “I thought he’d died and that was the end of it.”

A minute contortion of Maria’s brow might have been sympathy, but it smoothed out before Melinda could be sure.

“It was this severe?” she asked.

Melinda hesitated, considered downplaying it, but she had no idea how much Andrew might have already told them and lying would do her more harm than good if she were found out. “About the same, yes.”

Maria made a note on her clipboard.

“You’ve been removed from field duty for the indefinite future,” she said. “You went down with no warning and it blew the mission.” A pause, a very, very long one while Maria studied her. “With your permission, S.H.I.E.L.D. can put resources into locating your soulmate. Get you back into the field faster.”

“Absolutely not,” Melinda snapped.

“At least _think_ about it.” And there was the judgment. The _you aren’t really in love with Andrew_ that they’d been facing for years because they weren’t ‘made for each other’ the same way other couples were. 

“No one wants to take you out of the field, Melinda. You’re a good agent, you love the job. Let us help you get back to it.”

“No.”

 

Drew’s embrace upon her release felt unsure, but he handed her her crutch and helped her from the hospital to the car with a supportive hand on her back, fingers stroking gently as they walked.

He consulted for S.H.I.E.L.D. He’d know what Maria had offered her, and it bothered her a little that he hadn’t broached the subject yet. Did he think she might have accepted? Jumped on the chance to find the person he’d helped her acknowledge as dead years ago?

“D’you need to get an anti-toxin script filled?” he asked.

Melinda nodded. They’d put her on a phantom pain blocker; a highly controlled, highly toxic last-resort painkiller used largely when the other soul in an unmet pair died. Even having been on the blocker for less than 48 hours meant two weeks’ worth of pills to counter some of the effects. 

“They pulled me out of the field,” she said when they got into the car, and Andrew started pulling it around to head for the pharmacy on the other end of the base.

“Yeah.”

“I’m going to take some leave, then there’s probably a base position I can take. Office stuff. Maybe train and become a handler instead.”

“You’d be good at that,” he said. “But would you be happy doing it?”

“As close as I’m going to get to being on the ground. I’ll make do.”

Silence. Then, “If I found him. Them. That wouldn’t have to change anything.”

Andrew made an uncomfortable noise. “It would. It always does, Mel. I’ve seen it happen. Couple of times.”

He didn’t think they were different and she didn’t dare ask him why.

“I told her not to look.”

His shoulders shifted and eased like the tension had left them. “Okay,” he said. Then, “Thank you.”

“I love _you_ , Drew. Not this person I’ve never met. You. I picked _you_.”

He smiled. Actually smiled, and maybe everything was going to be okay. 

“Love you too, babe.”

 

The period of not-quite-forced-but-still- _strongly_ -suggested leave Melinda took ended up being a lot longer than she would have wanted. 

She rolled over one morning, three weeks into it, to find Andrew staring down at her, a fond, almost dopey look on his face.

“What?” 

He shook his head, but the expression didn’t disappear.

“ _What?_ ” she tried again.

The scent of coffee had filled the room sometime while she was sleeping and Melinda wrinkled her nose. Andrew ducked and kissed her on the forehead, reaching off to the side table afterward and passing her a strong, dark mug of tea.

“How long have you been up?” she asked, taking it and chasing the coffee fumes from her nose with one long whiff of tea.

“A little while,” he said. “I booked the day off work. I thought we could take the day, do something fun.” He delivered it all with a little _‘I’m hiding something’_ grin.

It was early—their bedroom windows faced east and sun only graced the walls in the faintest way, keeping everything still a little bit grey as dawn filtered in through the blinds.

Melinda took a sip of tea and raised an eyebrow at him, waiting for him to continue. 

He reached beneath his pillow and, with a flourish, presented a small folder to her. 

Two plane tickets and an itinerary laid inside.

“Honolulu? Andrew, no one flies to Hawaii for a daytrip.”

“Okay,” he said, and his expression feigned guilt, “I booked today and next week off.”

Melinda frowned at him. 

“And the flight leaves in three hours, so…” In a single motion he rose from the bed, grabbing her and lifting her, sheets and all, with him. Laughter burst from her and she laid a hand flat against his chest, it landing with a soft _‘slap’_ when she caught herself.

“It will _not_ be faster if we shower together,” she said.

“We could time it.”

“That really a record you want to set?” 

He snorted. “Maybe not.”

 

They got married in Hawaii, on the beach during one of the most spectacular sunsets she’d ever seen, on a whim.

Her mother wasn’t impressed.

 

She returned to S.H.I.E.L.D. six weeks after the incident with a simple band on her finger and an empty desk waiting for her. A thick manual sat atop it, stark black and white on utilitarian grey.

Melinda set a framed picture of Andrew near the booklet, the brilliance of the island sunset behind him bringing colour to the scene, his smile lightening the weight of all the paperwork she needed to wade through.

She didn’t even make it three pages into the manual she’d been left before a voice interrupted her.

“Hey, May!”

“Barton.”

She shut the manual and tucked it away in the top desk drawer. When she looked up, for a moment she thought he’d seen the cover and was about to start interrogating her about officer training.

Then she realized the ring had caught his attention instead.

“Welcome to the club,” he said with a bit of a grin.

“Different chapter,” she replied. “Did you need something?”

He crossed his arms, looking putout that she refused to bond with him over being married, of all things. Melinda waited.

“Right,” he said after spending far too long looking at Andrew’s picture on her desk. “You were supposed to teach me to fly. We had it all lined up, remember? And then you go and get yourself taken out of the field. What’s with that?”

“I’ll find you another teacher,” she said with a sigh. She’d forgotten. Barton had been on leave of his own when she’d been pulled out of the field, but she’d been scheduled to start training him when he returned, over a month ago.

“Covered. Fast learner. Cleared for basic.”

She blinked as she processed that. Who the hell was accelerating Barton’s training, and why?

“I’m not sure I understand why you’re here, then.”

“I want you to give me more pointers. Come up in the air with me and teach me some tricks.”

 _That_ made her frown at him. “I’m not cleared for flight.”

He shrugged. “You’re not going to be flying. Just come and boss me around, get some practice for running back end.”

He _had_ seen the cover of the book then. She sighed. Being up in the air would be nice, but the cockpit sure as hell wouldn’t be quiet or peaceful with Barton flying. Still…

“I’ll talk to Hill.”

 

An unsettled feeling took up residence in Melinda’s gut when Hill cleared her to go up in the air with Barton. Sure, they were just training flights, and she was co-pilot and barely even touched the controls at that, but the permissions she’d been granted courted the line of letting her do things she shouldn’t have been cleared for, not with the limitations placed on her after the incident. 

If Hill played favourites, she would’ve said it reeked of favouritism. 

But she didn’t.

“You know, I took Laura out a couple times before we met. In the hospital, fucked up because I got into shit working with S.H.I.E.L.D. Still feel awful,” Barton said on their third time up in the air. 

He’d cut the comms a moment before. That didn’t make it better.

“I am not discussing this with you.”

“You’ve gotta be pissed.”

“At you, right now, yes.”

He laughed, unfazed, and took the quinjet in a loop that set the automatic locks on the seat belts tighter and tighter until the plane levelled out again. She tugged at the strap across her chest when the computer released it. 

“You’re really not curious at all. Not angry at all.”

“Who are you passing this conversation back to?” she asked, letting her irritation show in her voice. Last lesson. She was never getting in a quinjet alone with Clint Barton again.

“Whoa, no one, I swear,” he said. “I get it, you love Andrew. You want him to be your one and only and he’s not and you don’t care, whatever. But the people up top? The people up top are pissed, May. They want you back in the field.”

The unsettled feeling in her gut abated at the confirmation. She’d said no to Hill’s offer and S.H.I.E.L.D. had started looking anyway, and they’d make it an order instead of a personal favour.

“Take us down, see if you can do it with a ten-foot clearance,” she said.

Barton flipped the comms back on, but not before he gave her a level look. She nodded in acknowledgement.

 

It meant something that Barton had shared information about his family with her, and Melinda had to grapple with that in addition to everything else. He was on her side—why, she didn’t know, but she’d take it.

She needed to tell Andrew that Hill wasn’t being as understanding as they’d hoped about it all, but he’d been working late for the past few weeks and she hadn’t had a chance.

She gave up hoping that they might be able to talk at home and she went down to his office to meet him one evening. 

It was just shy of 1900 and she brought dinner in a plastic bag—purchased pre-made food from the grocery store that they could heat up in the microwave, instead of anything she might try cooking herself. He’d been eating when he got home, close to midnight almost every evening, so she thought it was the least she could do if she was going to try and ambush him into a conversation at the office.

A sign reading that he was in a session greeted her when she arrived and Melinda sighed and dropped herself down into one of the chairs in the outer office, pulled out a file she’d been working through earlier and settled in for a long wait.

An hour later the door opened and Andrew’s patient stepped out; a young woman—kid, really—with danger in her stance and clenched fists. Her expression was wild, memorable, bright eyes faintly tinged with a pink accented by her tightly pulled back red hair.

She met Melinda’s gaze and a cool look slid over top the wild one in less than the blink of an eye, so quickly it was like she’d put on a mask, and she strode through the outer office without any further acknowledgement and was gone.

Melinda waited another minute or two before knocking on the frame of the ajar door to the office-proper.

“Come in, Natasha,” Andrew called. 

“So that was her name,” Melinda said, pushing the door open. 

Andrew looked up from shuffling papers on his desk and smiled at her, though he looked exhausted. 

She held out the plastic bag of food like an offering. “Brought dinner.”

“You’re amazing,” he said, and now the exhaustion came through in his voice, in a way that he would never have let it when he thought she was his patient.

“Mm, I know.” She crossed the room to him and finished her greeting with a kiss. He wrapped his arms around her and held her close. She returned the embrace, feeling a quake run through him that might have been a shiver. She rubbed small circles on his back until he broke the hug and announced that he was starving.

“Everything okay?” she asked once they’d heated the food and settled onto the small couch in his office, shoulders pressed together in a way that made it hard to work a fork but that Andrew seemed to need.

Even as she speared rubbery parisienne potatoes and asked, though, she knew it wasn’t. Melinda couldn’t get the image of Natasha, standing framed in the doorway and looking momentarily very, very open, and very, very troubled out of her head. If she was the reason Andrew had been working so much overtime lately, it was no wonder she’d found him so rundown now.

“She’s classified, strictly speaking,” he said around a mouthful of chicken. 

“Everything okay _with you?_ ” she clarified.

“Well I haven’t seen you enough lately, and that’s not okay,” he said, and wagged his eyebrows at her.

“You’re derailing,” she said, and speared another potato.

He chuckled. “I’m not, I promise. I miss you, but they’re keeping me busy working with her. It’ll probably be hectic for another couple weeks or so, and then I should be back to regular hours.”

She gave him a long, _long,_ look, tilting her head to the side and leaning away to give him the full effect of it.

“Everything’s good, Mel.” He grabbed her hand in his and she could feel his wedding band resting against her knuckle. She sighed and rested her head on his shoulder.

“Good.”

 

She got married again in her dreams that night, standing on the beach and laughing with Andrew by her side. The broad-chested, bearded man who’d officiated their wedding stood off to one side, smiling at them as he pronounced them wed.

“You may kiss the bride,” he said.

She and Andrew were already locked together.

They pulled apart and the officiant was gone, replaced instead by the woman from Andrew’s office. She wore the same wild expression, but now it had Melinda as its target, and that boiling danger she radiated felt as though it could be unleashed at any moment.

Pulling Andrew along with her, Melinda took a step back.

The beach fell away around them, leaving her standing between the woman and Andrew, shielding him, on a tiny island. The waves pulled sand away from their feet each time they broke against it.

Melinda woke when water lapped at her toes, and she wiggled them under the covers to check they remained dry. 

Andrew had an arm around her waist, holding her as he slept, and she pressed back into his chest, her hand on his wrist. She fell back asleep a few minutes later.

 

The next couple months saw circumstance throw Natasha Romanoff into Melinda’s path over and over again, some half dozen times at least.

It wasn’t only that Andrew had been appointed primary overseer of her case. Melinda ran into Romanoff in the cafeteria, in the halls, in the Director’s office, and once accompanied by Barton in a restricted wing at H.Q. 

And maybe running into her so often wasn’t all that unusual in itself—with Melinda’s having settled into her new routine, and working in the building, she saw a lot more people with far more frequency than she had as an active field agent—but each and every time Romanoff made careful, calculated eye contact with her.

It was unsettling. 

It was far too interested.

Worst of all, it had Melinda far too intrigued and that interest left her unable to avert her own gaze, to break off the contact even when she was conscious enough of the situation and knew she shouldn’t be staring.

At least she had no reason to wonder why Romanoff kept appearing in her dreams. So much interest from Romanoff, and Melinda’s own wariness about what on earth could have her so fascinated kept Romanoff appearing, always the silent observer, in her dreams with Andrew.

Dreams that had increased in frequency, perhaps because Melinda was so concerned with what the phantom pain occurrences meant for her marriage in the long run.

Melinda rubbed her thumb back and forth across her wedding band, staring past her hand, through it, unseeing. 

Then she picked up her desk phone and dialed her mom.

_“Heard you’d been pulled from the field.”_

Melinda sighed. Who did she have reporting back to her? “Hi, Mom. How’re you?”

_“I’m fine. Let’s talk about you.”_

 

Lian May’s tone was a more than a little _‘I told you so’_ regarding Melinda’s view on soulmates, but she didn’t think that Melinda should drop everything and divorce Andrew and go searching; she had, in fact, been quite against it when Melinda hinted just the tiniest bit in that direction, to test and get a feel for how that thought felt.

It hurt, and she’d been grateful when Lian shut it down.

 _“I like Andrew,”_ she’d said, making Melinda smile.

“My mom’s agitating for us to have a real wedding,” she told Andrew that night. “Ceremony. Aisle.”

“Big white dress?”

“My mother’s wedding. Red.”

Andrew chuckled and perched next to her on the couch. “Right. She going to plan it for us?” He wrapped his arm around her and opened a folder across his lap.

What a matched pair they made, both bringing their work home with them.

Looking up from her own file, Melinda frowned at him. “If we were going to have a real ceremony, I wouldn’t let her plan it.”

“Do you want to have one?”

Did she? They’d barely been married six months, she shouldn’t already be feeling like she needed to renew her vows. Maybe it was just that it was still so new, that she wasn’t used to being married and didn’t feel married, and this would fix that.

Maybe if they had a real wedding, Natasha Romanoff and her big, wild eyes would stop looming in Melinda’s dreams.

“Yeah. You know, I think I do.”

He leaned in close and pressed his lips to her neck. “That means we get another wedding night, you know," he said, inches from her earlobe.

Melinda laughed and let her fingers creep up his thigh, nudging aside the files laying across his lap. “One with a little less sand this time, hmm?”

 

Being a rookie handler meant Melinda didn’t have any assets assigned under her yet. To get experience under her belt, though, she consulted on jobs with specialists in the field who had skill sets similar to her own, with the asset’s handler acting as go-between in the communications’ room. 

“Got an assignment for you.”

She regarded Maria with eyes the slightest bit bleary from a late night of wedding planning, processing the words through a filter fogged by the very same.

“When?”

“Briefing room on 15 in Building C. 10 minutes.”

She’d backed out of the doorway and vanished down the hall before Melinda could voice her doubt about whether her access card would allow her entry to C.

She snatched her jacket from the back of her chair anyway, and sent a quick message to Andrew’s pager, letting him know she’d be late, before taking off.

 

Hill handed her a thin file as soon as she entered the briefing room, its cover already folded over and open to the profile of the asset on the ground. 

The name gave Melinda pause, but Hill launched into the mission brief as soon as the door finished clicking closed behind her.

“We’re two hours out on retrieval of a document from the Ukrainian embassy in Belarus. It’s a highly classified S.H.I.E.L.D. intel file and it is imperative that we both retrieve the file and destroy any duplications or further reference to the information elsewhere in the embassy.”

Melinda contained her frown as the recognition chiming in her mind quickly transformed into alarm bells. 

“Barton and Romanoff are on the ground?” she asked. S.H.I.E.L.D. had planted that damn intel file. She’d been the one to do it. Why they’d decided now that it needed to be retrieved was anyone’s guess--and she wasn’t going to overthink it.

“Romanoff is. Barton is providing cover. We couldn’t get a wire on Romanoff so he’ll be monitoring her and captioning her movements for us.”

Melinda flipped back through the pages in her hand, skimming them to try and glean anything that might aid in guiding a couple of very, very young assets in a mission on the other side of the world that already looked doomed.

“We pulled you in for your familiarity with the territory,” Hill said, and handed her a headset.

“Agent May confirming on four,” she said.

 _“Four confirmed,”_ Barton’s voice said in her ear, sounding very far away through the poor connection. _“Welcome to the outside of the party. Nat’s eating canapés and the warmers in my boots are fading fast.”_

“Describe your sightline for me, Hawkeye,” Coulson said on the tail of a unison eyeroll from the room.

_“View through the bay windows on the south side of the embassy. There’s a big ass pine tree in the way of the whole left window panel but the rest is a clear view of guys in suits and women in dresses. Great view of the dessert table too._

_“Widow makes an appearance in my right window every five to seven like we discussed. Party should be over in another hour and a half and then it’ll be go.”_

“How long since your last glimpse of Romanoff?” Melinda asked. Everything Barton had said lined up with the mission parameters, except the nervous feeling in her gut. He made this sound routine enough that Melinda suspected his clearance didn’t even let him know what it was they were stealing. 

_“Four and a half minutes and counting.”_

“Keep us posted,” Coulson said, and gestured for Melinda to switch off the mic on her headset. He did the same. 

An active, in-the-middle-of-an-op comms room wasn’t the place to get heated, and anyway Melinda didn’t have the authority or influence to comment on how and when S.H.I.E.L.D. decided to conduct their business, but it sure as hell seemed to her that this op had been designed to contain as many risks as possible. 

“We planted that file,” Melinda said, keeping her tone mild because hurling accusations was the only other alternative. _‘Familiarity with the territory’_ was one way to put it. She’d planted the damn thing herself, couldn’t have imagined that one day, years later, she’d be pulled in on an op to retrieve it. 

“We’ll keep that to ourselves,” Coulson replied, too jovial for the situation. He flipped his mic back on before she could blast him for it. 

“Report, Hawkeye,” Melinda said on the tail of reactivating her own headset. 

_“My gut’s not happy. Nat hasn’t given me even a glimpse of red in six minutes.”_

“Five to seven,” Coulson reminded him.

Barton grunted, faint and broken up through the distant comm line. 

Staticky silence spread between them, blanketing a room tense with them, all three, waiting for Barton to confirm Romanoff’s check-in. Thirty seconds passed; then a minute. The clock on the wall climbed ever upward and Melinda knew Coulson and Hill were just as focused on it as she was.

 _“Moving to my second vantage. She’s late,”_ Barton said.

“Hold where you are, it’s a big room,” Coulson said.

_“It’s been almost nine minutes!”_

“Hold.”

Shooting pain zinged through Melinda’s ankle. She pressed her foot against the floor, holding back a grimace and hoping nothing showed on her face. Not now. Not in the middle of an op that didn’t need any more help going sideways.

The rustling noise of wind buffeting Barton’s microphone grew louder, more noisy, like a gust had picked up and wouldn’t break.

“I said _hold,_ Hawkeye,” Coulson said in warning.

Barton didn’t respond, the continued racket of the static speaking for him as he ignored the order.

Melinda’s ankle throbbed like she’d twisted it, the centre radiating fire. Two injuries to the same ankle, or broken outright and still being used. 

She curled her toes, trying to focus on anything that might draw the pain away. Fought, too, the desire to gasp aloud from the pain, forcing it back at the expense of tightness in her chest, rigid self-control barely conquering her need to react and her breath coming short as a result.

“May?” Hill prompted at the same time as Barton said _“I’ve got fuck all”_ in their ears. 

“Does everything else look normal?” she ground out. Coulson and Hill fixed her with long looks, but the pain had dissipated from the constant zing of jagged edges jabbing muscle to the dull throb of the joint being hurt but not in use. She could work with that. _Had to,_ because an operative’s life might be on the line.

_“Need to get closer to tell.”_

Coulson frowned, attention on the files spread across the desk in front of him. 

“Do it,” Hill ordered. Her gaze weighed Melinda, though what calculation she’d become a variable in, Melinda couldn’t say. 

_“Wait,”_ Barton said. Then, _“I’ve got a car coming out of the underground lot. Black limo. Flags on the hood. Can’t tell the crest but all the Heads of State should still be inside. Driving real slow.”_

“Tell me Black Widow’s driving it,” Coulson said. It sounded like a prayer.

 _“You ever seen Nat drive? Her speedometer’s adjusted so it reads 10 when you’re doing 40.”_ He didn’t wait to find out if the joke fell flat or not. _“Make the call, boss. Do I go in or assume these guys’ve got her?”_

“We need that file,” Hill said, flicking her mic off.

Barton didn’t have the skill set to get in there and get it though, and if Widow’s operation had been compromised they could lose both assets in one fell swoop.

“You think she’s in the car, Barton?” Asking for feedback from the operative on the ground, as he always did. As a Field Agent, Melinda had liked working under Phil, too.

_“Yeah.”_

“Permission granted to track the suspects.”

_“In pursuit.”_

Only the softest sounds of breath, and the echoes of Barton’s boots striking concrete followed in his descent of the three flights of stairs between his vantage point and the street. Hill turned on the screen in the front of the room, a green spot lighting up in the centre of an elevation map to mark Barton’s place.

“Has the car accelerated to the limit?” May asked.

A thud through the headset when Barton shut his car door. _“Yeah. Still in sight though.”_

It wouldn’t be for long. The map showed winding, narrow streets leading away in every direction from the Embassy. That Barton could still see the car leaving spoke to the speed it travelled, and the difficulty following it without being detected would present.

"We've got you on screen."

 _“I’m going to let them get out of the heightened security area and then blow a tire,”_ Barton said. 

“We’d rather you keep conflict off the streets as much as possible.”

_“Sure, yeah, right.”_

And how was that for a resounding _‘Fuck you, Sir’._

“May.” Hill’s tone prompted her to turn at attention. “We still need to retrieve the documents. A new team will be in place and on the ground in 36 hours. You’ll be overseeing. Get some rest before then.” Hill nodded toward the door. “Dismissed.”

Leave getting the assets out to the experience in the room, in other words. 

Melinda rose, leaving the mission folder on the desk to be disposed of. If Maria wanted to push her out of the way of whatever fallout came of Romanoff going missing, Melinda was more than willing to take it. 

The throbbing of the phantom pain in her foot increased when she stood on it. If she limped a little toward the door, everyone else was too focused on the map and Barton’s voice in their ear to notice.

Her fingers brushed the doorknob and pain lanced through her hand. Her knees buckled. She hit the floor with the shock of it, cradling the hurt hand in the other and looking for the injury.

Nothing. No blood, at least. Phantom pain again, but it hurt like someone had stabbed something sharp and thick underneath her fingernail and left it there.

A hand brushed her shoulder and Melinda threw her arm out, hitting shins and bringing a body down almost on top of her.

“Hey, _hey,_ it’s me!” 

Coulson, and right in her ear. The closeness was good. The closeness reminded her that she hadn’t left the comm room. Reminded her that, despite the pain pulsing through her foot and screaming in her hand, no ill had befallen her. 

And, if he hadn’t been so close, she wouldn’t have been able to hear him over the rushing in her ears.

 _“May,”_ Coulson prompted.

“I can hear you,” she ground out. “Focus on Barton.” She tested her feet under her, transferring weight little-by-little back onto them. Her knees held as she rose, clawing at the door for balance with her hands still together, the unharmed protecting the throbbing.

“Hill’s got Barton,” he said, and grabbed at her elbow. “Come and sit while we wait for Medical.”

"You have an agent _in the field._ "

He’d taken his headset off, all but dumped the mission onto Hill and it didn’t sit well with Melinda that Romanoff’s very real situation—whether she was in trouble or not, whether she was in that car or not—was being thrust onto the backburner in favour of a phantom pain incident.

“I can do more for you right now than I can for them.”

His fingers a vice around her elbow, Coulson tugged her forward. He pushed her into the chair he'd vacated, looked her in the eye for a long moment, then disappeared from her line of sight.

Cradling her hand, Melinda didn’t watch him go. Her hand ached, pain radiating from her finger all the way up her arm. Her foot still throbbed, too, hot and fiery.

She laid her head back against the chair, tried to get as comfortable as she could, upright and in a comm room. Coulson came back with a bottle of water held outstretched, lid already removed.

She reached out for it with her pain-free hand, the other dropping to her lap so she could curl around it, protecting it as though it were actually injured and didn’t just feel like it was.

Melinda managed a sip before a fresh, blistering sensation shot up the back of that hand, too. The bottle fell from her fingers, water spilling across her and pouring out onto the floor.

“Barton’s got sight of Romanoff,” Hill barked when Coulson leapt forward to try and rescue Melinda from the puddle forming in her lap.

Apology on his face, he grabbed up his headset. “Talk to me, Barton.”

Melinda groaned and curled in on herself, stomach and thighs sandwiching her hands between them. The cool water soaking her lap was only soothing for a moment before it started warming, discomfort building.

 _‘You’re not hurt,’_ she thought to herself. Repeated it again, and again. Gave voice to it when the mental litany wasn’t distracting enough. When it couldn’t convince her that her heart wasn’t pumping blood from tiny cuts all up and down the back of one hand, or letting it seep from beneath the index finger of the other.

Was still repeating it when medical arrived and injected her with a sedative-laced phantom pain blocker and took her from the comms room on a stretcher.

 

She awoke to Andrew at her bedside. His being there brought on a stronger burst of relief than she thought it ought to, rationally. Weren’t they married, after all? Wasn’t Andrew always, _always_ there when she needed him?

She’d been having dreams again, though. Turbulent dreams—nightmares, really—no doubt brought on by all of the drugs racing through her system.

She couldn’t remember Andrew being present in any of them. So absent had he been that, waking now to find him very real and present beside her was jarring. She tried to rein in the last vestiges of the dream, but whatever remained only stayed with her as vague impressions of feeling. 

Murkiness lurked in her brain, anchored there no doubt by all the drugs.

“Hey,” Andrew said. “How’re you feeling?”

Foggy. Numb. From the IV in her hand or an aching aftereffect from some soulmate she’d never met, hospitalized by the same injuries that had Melinda prone in bed and feeling like someone else. Living another person’s life, another person’s mistakes, was tired and old.

Tired and old and—

Rage flowed through her. And how she _hated_ them. This person whose very existence had so disrupted her life. Turned in on its head and made everything tilt sideways until it fell and crashed on the floor.

Had so skewed her mind, her thoughts, her life, that she looked at Andrew now and the calm and peace that came along with him was absent. Vanished, like the phantom pain and the drugs and the chaos in her dreams had conspired to disappear her feelings for a husband she adored.

“I’m—”

Everything stopped. everything but one, single thought that shot like a bullet and tore a hole through her thoughts, murkiness clinging to it but not heavily enough to cloud it over again.

Her.

Of course it was her. The dreams. The frequency of intense phantom pain occurrences. How could she not have considered Natasha Romanoff after that very first night, when her figure had lurked in dreams of her wedding?

“I—” _need to see Romanoff and curse her for ruining everything I had._

But it wasn’t her fault. She hadn’t chosen Melinda anymore than Melinda had chosen her, and no doubt she’d had pain incidents to rival Melinda’s.

Though not as bad if she continued to be allowed in the field, and on high-risk ops no less.

“I think I need more sleep.”

Andrew smiled at her, a little sad and wistful. 

“Yeah. As much as you need. I love you.”

“Love you,” Melinda replied. Not because it felt like the thing to say (though it did) but because, even if things were murky and uncertain now, she had chosen Andrew. She and Andrew had built their life together in the face of all the sidelong glances and muted muttering.

She loved Andrew.

Didn’t she?


	2. Chapter 2

_a kick in the teeth is good for some; a kiss with a fist is better than none  
Kiss with a Fist - Florence + the Machine_

Sleep came, a relief if nothing else was. Better than waking to her mind assaulting her with thoughts about Romanoff, demanding to know how she could have been so blind to the signs.

She could still be wrong, and maybe she was. If they were anyone else, normal civilians without their training and careers, Romanoff might’ve shown by now if she shared the dreams harassing Melinda. She might’ve discovered by now that Romanoff, too, shared in her near-obsession.

A dent in the yellowed ceiling tile above her caught the attention of her wandering eyes, giving her something to focus on. She traced it, up and down and up and down and— 

_Hadn’t_ Romanoff met her eyes whenever they crossed? Scrutinized her in that uncomfortable way, feeding into both Melinda’s own fascination with her and discomfort with how singled out she’d felt.

She could turn a blind eye to the facts if she wanted, but by this point the evidence had amounted to such a pile surrounding her that she’d need a blindfold to do it. 

At least— _at the very least_ —her S.H.I.E.L.D. career no longer looked in immediate danger of termination. If—and she so wanted it to be a big ‘if’—fate’s wrangling tied her to Romanoff outside of all reason, S.H.I.E.L.D. would have no reason for keeping her from the field. 

The end of the phantom pain incidences sat within reach. That lifted her mood a little.

 

It was days before she next saw Romanoff. Restless days, especially those before she was released from the hospital, spent with her mind racing through her options.

Options.

It wasn’t as though she didn’t have any, or even only a few. She had plenty of options. How many of them were viable, or _good_ ; well, that was another thing altogether.

Her restlessness wasn’t helped any by the spreading, growing itch she had to see Romanoff, either. If she could tie that itch back to just a longing to get back into the field, to harness some sort of normalcy and tether it to her, she might’ve been more comfortable with it.

But normalcy wasn’t the only result she wanted to come of being able to settle, once and for all, if she and Romanoff were soulmates.

Burning curiosity accompanied her desire for things to return to how they had been. And try as she might, she couldn’t stop that curiosity from intruding on her thoughts and leading them on a meandering _‘What if?’_ trail through her mind.

It had been years since Melinda had really sat back and wondered what kind of person might be connected to her.  Years—she’d probably been a teenager when she’d last really, seriously spent any time worrying—or even thinking—about anything to do with the topic.

To be back again, now, was disconcerting at best. 

So when she ran into Romanoff and Barton days later, her pain at the sight of Romanoff’s walking cast was born more of memory than sympathy. Nods were exchanged as they passed, and Melinda caught a glimpse of bandages wrapped around Romanoff’s hand, the edge just sticking out of the pocket of her sweater.

It was like a bell pealed in her mind, one that announced _‘She’s the one’_ and her fingers started curling in toward her palms again, like vivid memory might have her hands start throbbing any moment.

No one spoke, and Melinda was more than grateful for that—she found herself lacking in things to say.

 

With the visual confirmation that Romanoff had, indeed, been the one to suffer the injuries Melinda’d felt the day of the blown mission, she found she almost hadn’t even really needed it. She’d _wanted_ it, certainly, and having it made her 100% confident that Romanoff was the one—but she hadn’t _needed_ it.

Still, she’d frozen entirely and that hadn’t been in the plan. She should’ve gone out of her way to brush up against Romanoff, to ensure they made skin contact somehow, just to get that out of the way and settle the state of the bond once and for all.

She hadn’t, of course, because it had been a broad hallway and there had been no way to be casual about it, never mind that she really, _really_ didn’t want anyone else involved, especially at this juncture, and Barton had been right there.

But she should’ve. She couldn’t shake that. Not when failing to do so saw her sitting on the couch at home, twirling a pen in her fingers and staring blankly at a folio of reports spread across the table in front of her. 

“The venue called, left a message earlier. They want to confirm the date, and talk catering.” Andrew came in the room reading off a post-it note that was stuck to his finger like a little orange flag. He veered around the couch to stop in front of her, across from the table, when before he would’ve come up behind her instead.

“When do they need the deposit?” Melinda asked, as though it made complete sense to continue talking wedding plans when Andrew felt he had to all but tiptoe around her. 

She piled up the papers that had been scattered there and patted the couch for him to join her. 

He shrugged as he did. “Didn’t say. You want me to call tomorrow?”

Melinda rested her head against his shoulder, scootching over so their hips were touching. His arm came around her in response and a moment later she was more leaning into him than sitting up under her own power. 

He was smiling when she looked up. “I’ve got it,” she said. “I’ll call when I get into the office and sort it out.”

“Okay,” he said.

He leaned in to kiss her; she met him halfway. And, shit, she should tell him about Romanoff but little orange flags be damned, now wasn’t the time.

The papers that crumpled beneath them when she pushed him over probably weren’t anything she had to hand back to a superior later.

 

Melinda had the booking manager of the banquet hall droning inane details about stages and the types of sound systems they could reserve into her ear when a knock came on her office door the next morning.

It was early, and if she hadn’t forgotten a meeting (a quick glance at her calendar confirmed she hadn’t), she had no idea who could possibly need her at this hour.

“One of us will come by with the deposit tomorrow,” she said, interrupting the manager’s spiel, which had started going into microphone details. “The default sound setup is fine.”

It didn’t sound at all as though sound systems had been forgotten when the manager gave his farewell and hung up.

“Open,” she called toward the door a moment later.

Her breath caught, brain screaming _‘Well, isn’t this nice?’_ when Romanoff slid in. She still wore the walking cast on her foot (of course, it had only been a day) but she carried a folder in bandage-free hands. 

Relief, more than appropriate for a stranger, spread through her at the sign of progress.

“Agent May,” Romanoff said. Melinda nodded in return. “Hill sent me with these,” she indicated with the folder, “to inform you that full debrief has finally been run on Belarus.” 

However Romanoff might’ve felt about the botched mission didn’t show in her face or her voice, even as she crossed the room and held out the folder.

Melinda’s gaze locked onto the pale thumb lying across the black plastic, near transfixed. This was the moment. They were alone, in her office where no one would just come barging in on them. She couldn’t have imagined better; she definitely couldn’t have made it happen on her own. 

Best of all, she could feel the fresh memory of Andrew pressed up against her. Skin warm against hers and it was easy to wrap herself up in that because whatever curiosity she might feel toward Romanoff, it was nothing compared to what she felt for Andrew.

Before she could reach out and take the folder, it slid forward onto her desk, and Romanoff’s hand was back by her side.

“I imagine you know why she wanted that hand delivered,” Romanoff said, and her tone was wry, conversational. And why shouldn’t it be? Melinda had just spent about twenty seconds too long staring at her thumb, like some sort of fetishist, and Romanoff didn’t have to be a super spy to have picked up on that one.

“Not a clue, actually,” Melinda said. She didn’t open the folder. It could wait, if it was actually anything of importance and not, as she was beginning to suspect, a ruse Hill had concocted.

Maybe Melinda was being paranoid—What could Hill know?—but she’d been in the room when Melinda went down, and she’d have seen Romanoff’s injuries for herself. It didn’t take much to put two-and-two together after that.

“But, wait.” 

Romanoff had turned to leave, and Melinda was out of her chair and leaning over the desk, hands planted on top of it, before she knew it.

The words, when they came, weren’t smooth. They weren’t even the practiced _‘I’d like us to sit down and talk because I think you might be my soulmate.’_

“Can I see your hand?” was what she asked instead.

Romanoff didn’t move, neither toward Melinda nor away from her, but if her expression had been guarded before, it was doubly so now. So carefully schooled was she behind a mask of vague interest, Melinda almost missed that Romanoff was on her guard at all.

“Excuse me?”

“Your hand,” Melinda said, putting her foot in her mouth since her toes were already there. “I noticed the bandages yesterday.”

“Medical cleared me,” Romanoff said. She nodded toward Melinda’s desk. “I’m sure it’s in there.”

She hadn’t turned to try and leave again, probably interpreting Melinda’s stopping her as framing them in a situation where she needed to be dismissed. 

Melinda sat back down. “Can we talk?” She gestured to the seat across from her, hoping to at least get Romanoff reprieve from standing on her broken foot.

Not looking perturbed, curious, or really, phased at all, Romanoff sat. 

“My understanding was that you only sat in on the op,” she said.

“This isn’t entirely about the mission.”

A flicker of interest entered Romanoff’s features. Melinda took that as a good sign, even if the other woman didn’t speak.

Pull the bandaid off fast. “This might sound, understandably, ludicrous to you, but I—” she rephrased what she wanted to say at the last moment, better words coming to her “—believe my inability to aid in the evac of your mission in Belarus may have been a side effect of the injuries you incurred.”

It didn’t take Romanoff any time at all to process the roundabout words. Her eyebrow slid up and her lips might’ve been pressed together, but a smirk hid in their single upturned corner.

“I’ve never gotten that one from a woman before.”

“It’s not a line.” Mortification spread in a prickling heat across Melinda’s chest. She shouldn’t be embarrassed; really, she shouldn’t. 

Romanoff nodded, and she was definitely smirking now. “I saw the ring.” She indicated Melinda’s hand, as though her meaning might not come across if she didn’t.

She shouldn’t be nervous. She was too old, too married, to be feeling as though she was a teenager and talking to her first crush again. 

Crush— 

The woman sitting across the desk was at least fifteen years her junior. Romanoff was, god, what, 20? 21? Could she even drink?

Most new recruits hadn’t even graduated out of the Academy at Romanoff’s age—Melinda hadn’t. And she sure as hell hadn’t been in dark on high-risk ops.

“So, you wanted to close the bond,” Romanoff said. “Assuming you’re correct.”

“I used to be a Field Agent. I was pulled out because of unpredictable, severe phantom pain. I want to go back.” 

“Am I supposed to apologize?”

_Yes._ “No.” Why the hell was she being so stubborn? A brush of the hand. That’s all it would take, and Romanoff wasn’t going for it.

“This isn’t just for me,” Melinda said. Romanoff was acting like she’d never had phantom pain, like it wasn’t a variable that impacted her work, but that was _impossible_ —even with the age difference, even if she’d only started feeling it later, Melinda hadn’t exactly gone untouched in the field. She’d had her own run-ins. Her own injuries. 

But something kindled in Romanoff’s eyes that suggested the thought hadn’t crossed her mind.

Could Melinda be completely off-base? Could it really be coincidence that Romanoff showed signs of the same injuries Melinda had felt that night?

She held out her hand, palm up and feeling like she was trying to coax a skittish animal. The careful look Romanoff gave that outstretched hand suggested the comparison wasn’t an exaggeration. 

“I’m afraid I’m not as convinced by this as you are,” Romanoff said, and reached out. Instead of laying her hand atop Melinda’s, though, she grabbed the letter opener from the pen holder on Melinda’s desk.

Melinda realized, a fraction of a moment before the sharp point of the letter opener pierced against the healing damage beneath Romanoff’s blackened fingernails, what she was about to do. She grabbed Romanoff’s hand as the first zing of pain started on her own.

A shock, like static build-up, arced through her fingers at the first contact, the sound snapping in an echo in the small office. Their eyes met, and Romanoff snatched her hand out of Melinda’s grasp, letting the letter opener fall onto the desk with a clatter.

“That was unnecessary,” Melinda snapped.

Romanoff’s lips were pressed together. “It was the easiest way to test it, and now we don’t know.”

Melinda could have rolled her eyes, revising Romanoff’s age in her head to closer to 20. A barely-more-than-a-teenager 20. “I felt that,” she said. “There’s nothing in it for me to invent any of this.”

She could still feel the shock that had sparked through their hands when they touched. Couldn’t _believe_ Romanoff had jumped to such an extreme to try and confirm her claim.

“Was that everything?” Romanoff asked, rising from her chair. She’d shut down entirely, and didn’t look at all as though she’d tried to stab herself to prove a point moments before.

“You don’t want to talk about this?” Melinda asked.

Romanoff’s expression suggested she thought she was a lunatic for even asking. But the shock confirmed it. The bond was closed. 

“You’re married, Agent May,” Romanoff said. “And regardless, I’m not interested.” 

As if that settled everything, Romanoff turned and left, giving Melinda a wonderful view as she did, and the dawning of another dilemma.

Romanoff may not have been interested, but she sure as hell was—and wasn’t _that_ just another of fate’s twisted little games.

 

   
“As much as I’ve enjoyed the back-end training, I’m applying to have my field status reinstated.”

Melinda had wasted no time at all making sure she got a meeting with Maria Hill the very day after she sat down to talk with Romanoff. No sense in beating around the bush when it stood to reason that Hill had set them up—that Hill was savvy about the whole situation.

She’d been clear from the onset about wanting Melinda back in the field, and now she steepled her fingers and looked for all the world like the cat that got the canary.

And Melinda really needed to stop thinking in cliches. 

“I’ll need corroboration from your soulmate to file the paperwork.”

“Good luck,” Melinda muttered.

Hill smiled. “It _is_ Romanoff, then?” she asked, and she’d made a form appear on her desk, apparently out of thin air, and began filling it in.

“As you knew when you set up yesterday.”

“I suspected.” Hill seemed to take in Melinda’s sour expression and sighed, holding her hands out. “Melinda. This is a _good thing_.”

For S.H.I.E.L.D., maybe. It held too many variables for her, not the least being Romanoff’s lack of interest in the face of Melinda’s own steadily burning crush. She wished she could take it as a blessing that Romanoff didn’t have any designs on trying to ruin her marriage, but, well. Maybe she was allowed to be offended that her soulmate wanted nothing to do with her.

“Do you need me to get Romanoff to fill the forms out?”

“I’m getting that that isn’t the best way to get them back anytime this year, so, no.” Hill handed a pile of pages over to her. “Fill these out. Bring them back to me. I’ll get Romanoff to fill in the sections she needs to and then file it. You should be back on active duty by the end of the month.”

Well, that was something. “Thanks.”

Hill shrugged. “I’m going to have Romanoff fill out the same set of forms. I’ll need you to corroborate hers, too.”

Melinda nodded, hesitating while she thought over how much she should say. 

“Something else?” Hill asked.

Melinda shook her head. Better to keep Romanoff’s reluctance to herself. She worried any caution she might give about Romanoff’s doubts would only sound like her own discomfort in the disinterest. She wouldn’t pull Hill into this on a personal level. 

“Dismissed,” Hill said. “Get these back to me A.S.A.P.”

 

The forms created a state of hyper-consciousness in her as Melinda made her way through HQ with them clutched under her arm. She made sure to hide the pages against her body, lest curious, wandering eyes make out the content and rumours start to spread. That she was returning to the field would get around eventually, but Melinda wanted hold of the reins of that revelation when it did.

She suspected more conversations with Romanoff were in order before that came to light, too. People would be asking questions, and after Romanoff’s little show with the letter opener, Melinda didn’t think she could predict what the fallout would be if the details started to spread. 

She should have asked Hill how stable S.H.I.E.L.D. considered the woman to be. Asked if she could expect more shows like the one from her office, or if Romanoff had just been off-kilter in the moment from the revelation at hand.

Andrew would know. Hell, Andrew would’ve been the one to make the call that Romanoff was suited for the field. He also wouldn’t tell her a thing if she asked—and she respected him and the confidentiality of his work too much to put him in that position.

And, shit.

She’d jumped on the chance to move forward on getting back in the field. Pounced on it so fast that she hadn’t taken the time to sit down and explain things to Andrew.

And no, it wasn’t going to be the easiest conversation to have, not when things had already been tense on the subject of Melinda’s soulmate. Not when she thought Andrew expected her to disappear one day—to not come home because she’d replaced him without a word. 

Still, she’d run the gambit from realizing Romanoff was the one to closing the bond without a peep to Andrew to suggest anything had changed. It had seemed the right thing to do at the time. Only now did guilt start creeping up on her, its little, spiny hands reaching up to tug at her gut.

With a glance at the clock, she grabbed the phone and called Andrew’s office. When there was no answer, she left a message on his pager instead. 

He called her back an hour later. Melinda was halfway through the fifth page of seven in the package and relished having an excuse to drop her pen on the thirteenth variation of _‘Are you currently residing with your partner?’_

_“Everything okay?”_ Andrew asked. 

“Great. We need to get you a cell phone.”

_“I was in a session. Couldn’t’ve answered anyway.”_

“Personal voice mail, though.” Melinda reclined in her chair, letting the mundane conversation wash over her. “Do you have time to drive out to the hall and drop off the deposit cheque over lunch? Thought we could do it together.”

_“I’ve got a while before my next session, yeah.”_ Melinda could hear the smile in his voice.

“Good.”

They grabbed drive-thru burgers on the way out to the banquet hall, her driving and Andrew passing her the remnants of his fries at red lights, long after they’d finished the bulk of the meal.

The parking lot was empty when they arrived and Melinda pulled into a spot near the front doors. She killed the ignition, and almost reached down to undo her seatbelt when the enormity of what she was trying to pull off hit.

Deceptive. They couldn’t put in this deposit with Andrew in the dark about Romanoff. How deceptive of her, to go into this as though her life continued as normal, when it couldn’t be farther from it?

And maybe this wedding was just a formality—an excuse to have a party. But it was a symbol, too, and for her to hide something of this magnitude going in…

“Mel?”

The horn gave a soft, aborted honk when she let her head fall forward and hit the steering wheel. 

“I know who it is.” 

Melinda didn’t move, but from the corner of her eye she saw Andrew still.

Then he sighed. “It’s Natasha, isn’t it?”

Melinda shot upright. Did everyone at HQ already know!?

“How?” she demanded.

“She asked to be transferred,” he said. “Didn’t give a reason, but with the injuries, and your hospitalization. Now this. I put two-and-two together.”

Well. At least there was hardly anyone else at S.H.I.E.L.D. who had regular enough exposure to both her and Romanoff and the smarts to put it all together.

“Do you still want to do this?” Melinda asked. She gestured at the hall, feeling unsettled the moment the words left her mouth. If he said no? What then?

Andrew smiled at her, though, and held out his hand over the console. “You met your soulmate, and you’re still here with me. Yeah. I want to do this.”

She slid her hand into his. “Okay. Me, too.”

 

It was three nights later that her psyche rekindled dreams of Romanoff. Rekindled them and then turned them on their head.

Melinda’s feet made soft slap-slap-slaps on the pavement in the early morning hours. Other runners passed by her once in awhile, but it was too early for most, leaving her alone with her thoughts. 

Before she’d figured it out, met with Romanoff, closed the bond—before it all, Romanoff had been an interloper in her dreams. Someone to protect Andrew from.

She still was, and maybe they hadn’t changed so much. Not from the perspective of Melinda’s waking conscious. In her dreams, she and Andrew were still happily married. 

But Romanoff’s presence in this new dream had felt less unwelcome. Awake, Melinda could label her the interloper. Could say it had been a nightmare. But asleep, her subconscious hadn’t been so sure that Romanoff didn’t belong.

Melinda picked up her pace, tempted to sprint down the sidewalk, to try to run from the mess her personal life had turned into. She couldn’t outrun her problems, though, and trying wouldn’t give her the mindspace to work through them.

An hour of Tai Chi, post-run and post-shower, relaxed her but didn’t click the pieces together on any instant fixes to her mess.

Because there weren’t any, of course. She had made her decision—staying with Andrew was right. It felt right. She had no problem repeating that to herself until her crush on Natasha Romanoff fizzled out.

As if to continue the tune of the morning, though, Hill stood waiting by the door to Melinda’s office when she arrived that morning. Annoyance, verging on anger, lurked in every line of her face, but she forced out a tight smile when Melinda opened the office door.

Melinda raised her eyebrows and let Hill precede her inside.

“Did we have a meeting?”

Hill shook her head. “I wanted to personally update you on the status of your field reinstatement application.”

Melinda regarded her in surprise. That had been a lot faster than Hill quoted her originally. Three days? S.H.I.E.L.D. could move quickly on the bureaucracy side of things when it wanted to, but three days was obscene.

“Don’t get your hopes up,” Hill said before Melinda could voice her shock. “Romanoff won’t fill anything out.”

She didn’t exactly deflate, but all of the hope ballooning in her left and she raised her eyes to the ceiling. What a great day this was shaping up to be. “She give a reason?”

“Doesn’t want that kind of information on the book. Not even eyes-only in her personnel file.”

Not a surprise, really, that Romanoff was that paranoid. Melinda should’ve seen this coming.

“But she confirmed the bond closure to you?”

Hill’s shoulders shifted. “I can’t do anything without the paperwork.” She looked apologetic.

“Your hands are tied,” Melinda said, sceptical; she painted her suspicion that it was more of a  ‘won’t’ than ‘can’t’ situation in her voice. Even if Hill wanted Melinda back in the field as badly as she wanted it herself, she was playing some other angle here, too, that Melinda couldn’t quite figure out.

“Rules are clear.”

Melinda groaned, and Hill handed over a stack of pages.

“Get Romanoff to sign them. Bet you’ll have more luck than I did.”

“Three days ago you said the exact opposite,” Melinda pointed out.

Hill smiled at her. “Yeah. That was before I spoke to her.”

What did that mean?

Hill checked her watch, made a face, and a gesture suggesting she had somewhere else to be. “Good luck. I’ll take those papers whenever you have them filled out in full. Open invitation to my office.”

An open invitation to Hill’s office wasn’t going to help Melinda any when she didn’t have the faintest idea of how she might convince Romanoff to fill out and file her portion of the forms.

Melinda stared down at them, spread out across her desk. Her own pages were neatly filled out, her handwriting staring back at her.

Romanoff’s were utterly blank—Melinda suspected she’d never even taken them, just refused everything out of hand, the same way she’d shut down Melinda’s attempts at discussing their situation. Romanoff didn’t want anything to do with Melinda, and she’d carried that as far as being associated with her on a sheet of paper.

Melinda was offended. More than that, she was frustrated at the barriers being continually thrown in her path. Every time she surmounted one another grew, taller than the last, in front of her. 

No more.

She sought out Romanoff. Spent the next hour trawling through the corridors at HQ, wishing it were as easy to stumble across Romanoff when she was looking for her as it had been when she’d wanted to avoid her. Was it flattering herself to think that Romanoff was going out of her way to ensure she didn’t cross Melinda’s path at all?

Melinda was on the last leg of her search and about to give up when she spied a group of junior agents filing out of a lecture hall, Romanoff amongst them. She held a binder under her arm and kept herself separate from the group, silent and aloof where the others were chatting amongst themselves. Melinda frowned, for a moment concerned that the woman might not be fitting in well at S.H.I.E.L.D, before she shook off her worry. 

She had a goal, and Romanoff wasn’t her responsibility. 

Melinda planted herself in the other woman’s path when she veered around the group of chattering students. The neat handwriting on her binder label read _‘Policy’_ and Melinda could’ve laughed at how fitting.

Maybe they’d covered soulmate forms and personnel files in today’s lecture. Melinda wouldn’t doubt that Hill’s manipulations could extend that far.

“I think we need to talk,” Melinda said. 

Romanoff swept the corridor with a glance. 

“Of course not here,” Melinda added, willing to clarify if they got through this faster.

Awkward. Painful. That’s what this was. They were strangers, utter strangers, but Melinda’s fingers itched. She wanted to reach out and smooth that tiny mark of concern from between Romanoff’s eyebrows. She wanted the mask to fall, wanted to see what Romanoff felt like she needed to hide behind all of those layers.

She wanted to assure her that, whatever she was hiding, S.H.I.E.L.D. had her back now as long as she let it. 

_Melinda_ had her back now, if she wanted it.

She tried to be selfish about it, wanted her only associations with Romanoff to be those that would get her back into the field and back to doing what she loved, but lying to herself proved harder when the woman in question stood close enough to touch.

Romanoff acquiesced with a nod, remaining silent when she trailed Melinda back through the halls to her office. The office that, fingers crossed, would no longer be Melinda’s by the time the month was out.

Once there, Melinda didn’t sit. She leaned back against the front of the desk instead, arms folded over her chest, the folder with the uncompleted forms still held in one hand.

She gave them a bit of a wave, drawing Romanoff’s attention down. “I don’t understand,” Melinda said.

Romanoff’s eyebrow slid up but she said nothing. Her posture imitated Melinda’s, but taunted her by being more relaxed—arms crossed, shoulders dropped, hip jutted out to one side. Devil may care.

“I’m not asking you to move in with me,” Melinda said. “I’m asking you to fill out a form so I can go back to work.”

Romanoff gave her a terse smile, the only indication so far that she might be uncomfortable with being here, that she still wanted nothing to do with Melinda.

“I don’t want that type of information on record.”

“Romanoff, your file is so redacted there might be three people on the entire planet with clearance enough to read it.”

That terse smile again, maybe at the exaggeration, maybe at the implication that Melinda had tried accessing the file for herself.

“Files can be accessed without clearance. Leaked. How can you want that kind of personal information written down?”

“No one is—“

“Accessing S.H.I.E.L.D. personnel files who shouldn’t be? Maybe they aren’t interested in yours, but we’re not all that lucky.”

Brat.

Melinda let the files fall with a _‘smack’_ onto her desk. 

“What’s going on?” she asked. 

Romanoff’s shoulders tensed, and she shifted up almost to attention. She looked away for a moment, then sighed.

“I suppose you’ll hear it from Hill anyway, she seems to have a vested interest in our being friendly,” she said, dropping the words like each was a tiny fleck of rainwater. Delicate, like the topic was sensitive and she only shared under duress. “There was a body dropped in my apartment the day of our meeting.”

She paused, and it was Melinda’s turn to remain stoic. Unaffected by the news, by the cavalier way Romanoff had delivered it. 

“S.H.I.E.L.D. is investigating. Internally.”

Of course. Romanoff’s address was in her file. Never mind that there was an number of ways someone could know where she lived, she wouldn’t want any new information there. Like the name of a soulmate. Like another access point if someone was out to get her.

Romanoff was _protecting_ her. Or at least thought that she was.

"Are you a suspect?"

"It _is_ my apartment." She looked amused. _'Of course,'_ her expression said. _'Of course I'm a suspect.'_

“Are you a suspect?” Melinda repeated, making her say it out loud. “Have they been investigating you, personally?”

"Yes."

"Is it serious?"

Romanoff shook her head. "No one seems to think I'd be careless enough to leave a body lying around," she said.

Still so cavalier.

Melinda had skimmed the parts of her file that she could access. She knew enough to know that Natasha Romanoff was the same Black Widow whispered about. That dead bodies turning up in her wake was the norm for her rather than anything out of the ordinary.

She knew enough to know that if the Black Widow killed someone, you didn't know it was her.

Which either made this the perfect crime, or someone targeting Romanoff and trying to send her a message letting her know they were onto her.

"Do you need help?" Melinda asked.

She asked, because she had seen Romanoff in that hallway. Had seen her amongst students and junior agents, people who she had nothing in common with, and knew that Romanoff didn't have many friends—if any.

And it wasn't like Melinda had a lot of friends at S.H.I.E.L.D. herself, but she had people that she could count on.

Romanoff had... Well, Melinda wasn't really sure that she had anyone. Barton, maybe, who'd worked with her in the field, and who had dropped nicknames for her on a recorded channel.

Melinda, however much she wanted to fight against it, was her soulmate. She shouldn't leave her dealing with an investigation alone if she could be of any help at all.

"No," Romanoff said.

Melinda frowned. Unless, of course, the woman in question didn't want her help.

"I'm not accepting a favour in exchange for filling out those forms." Romanoff moved as though to leave, one hand on the door.

"Please," Melinda said. "We'll talk about that later. Let me help you."

Romanoff shook her head, long, tousled curls bouncing around her shoulders. "I don't need help."

Then she really did leave, dropping another problem in Melinda's lap—whether she'd intended on doing it or not—without solving any at all.

 

Melinda paced. She paced up and down the living room, each time squeezing between the couch and coffee table instead of just moving one of them out of her path. The squeezing gave her a moment to focus on something other than the thoughts racing around her head. The careful placement of her feet so she didn't send the coffee table over onto its side distracted her from the information that had been dumped on her that afternoon.

Romanoff wanted her help—or at least wanted _something_. She wouldn't have been so forthcoming with her situation if she didn't. She wouldn't have followed Melinda all the way to her office and let Melinda start interrogating her if she didn't.

Melinda didn't want to get involved. She didn't have to.

Except that she felt she did.  

Hill wanted her to get involved. She thought Melinda could get Romanoff to fill out the soulmate paperwork, and no doubt she knew about the ongoing investigation. She wouldn't expect Melinda to jump right in and muddle around getting involved, would she? Or somehow expect that to help? 

It wouldn't. Help, that was. Because Romanoff continued to want nothing to do with her and, really, she should be taking as much advantage of that as possible and staying away from her. She was tempted when she shouldn't be. Curious where she didn't want to be. And already far, far more intrigued than she had any right to be, being married.

The chain on the door jingled and snapped taut. Melinda made her way over to the door (with a careful step around the edge of the coffee table) and unhooked it to let Andrew in.

"You're in early," he said. "Or am I—“ He glanced down at his watch.

"I'm early," she assured him. "I've had a day." He looked at her askance and Melinda could only shake her head.

 

They talked a lot about nothing over dinner. It was nice. No wedding plans, no soulmate issues. Nothing of consequence, nothing dramatically life-changing. Nothing stressful.

"Anise. In my lasagna." Andrew poked a long bit of it to the side of his plate. Melinda leaned over to look.

"It came out of a package, don't look at me," she said when he gave her a long glance. "Flavour."

"Oregano, sure. Tomatoes. Ricotta. Anise?"

Melinda elbowed him in the side, but dug through her piece until she found the same. "Two. Not an anomaly."

"So you're saying we shouldn't return the lasagna for being defective?"

She raised an eyebrow at him, then dropped her fork and started laughing. Great, loud laughter like she hadn't experienced in ages. 

He started laughing with her. On and on and on until she'd almost forgotten how they'd begun.

"Anise—“ she started, trying to get it out and wiping eyes that had started to tear up. Her stomach hurt from laughing so hard, pain in the muscles like they'd never been used before. "How can anise be so funny?"

He shook his head, mouth moving but the words choked off before he could get them out. 

Melinda took great, heaving breaths, fighting to stop because she thought her stomach might seize with the effort of her laughter if she didn't. 

Andrew wasn't having any such luck. She smiled, almost dopily, at him as he continued to laugh, the sound echoing through the apartment.

This was good. This was right. This was home.

**Author's Note:**

> http://shieldivarius.tumblr.com

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Try to Be Wronger](https://archiveofourown.org/works/6294871) by [redroslin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/redroslin/pseuds/redroslin)




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